This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Virtue consists in doing our duty in the several relations we sustain in respect to ourselves, to our fellow-men, and to God, as known from reason, conscience and revelation.
Conscience | Duty | God | Men | Reason | Respect | Revelation | Virtue | Virtue | Respect |
Parties like only men who wear blinders and have committed a section of their conscience to their chief.
Conscience | Men |
Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell.
Conscience | Cruelty | Good | Hell | Cruelty |
The only God whom our thoughts can rest on, our hearts cling to, and our conscience can recognize, is the God whose image dwells in our own souls.
Conscience | God | Rest | God |
Dwight Eisenhower, fully Dwight David "Ike" Eisenhower
No man can always be right. So the struggle is to do one’s best; to keep the brain and conscience clear; never to be swayed by unworthy motives or inconsequential reasons, but to strive to unearth the basic factors involved and then do one’s duty.
Nothing strengthens the judgment and quickens the conscience like individual responsibility.
Conscience | Individual | Judgment | Nothing | Responsibility |
The most effective way to silence our guilty conscience is to convince ourselves and others that those we have sinned against are indeed depraved creatures, deserving every punishment, even extermination. We cannot pity those we have wronged, nor can we be indifferent toward them. We must hate and persecute them or else leave the door open to self-contempt.
Conscience | Contempt | Hate | Pity | Punishment | Self | Silence | Guilty |
Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
When we speak of conscience, it may easily be thought that in virtue of its form, which is abstract inwardness, conscience is at this point without more ado true conscience. But true conscience determines itself to will what is absolutely good and obligatory and is this self-determination.
Abstract | Conscience | Determination | Good | Self | Self-determination | Thought | Virtue | Virtue | Will | Thought |
God never ordained you to have a conscience for others. Your conscience is for you, and for you alone.
Conscience | God |
Success surely comes with conscience in the long run, other things being equal. Capacity and fidelity are commercially profitable qualities.
Capacity | Conscience | Fidelity | Qualities | Success |
Love it is – not conscience – that is God’s regent in the human soul, because it can govern the soul as nothing else can.
Every one has conscience enough to hate; few have religion enough to love.
Conscience | Enough | Hate | Love | Religion |
Mirthfulness is in the mind, and you cannot get it out. It is the blessed spirit that God has sent in the mind to dust it, to enliven its dark places, and to drive asceticism, like a foul fiend, out at the back door. It is just as good in its placed as conscience or veneration. Praying can o more be made a substitute for smiling than smiling can for praying.
Asceticism | Conscience | God | Good | Mind | Spirit | God | Blessed |
Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
When a man's conscience and the laws clash, it is his conscience that he must follow.
Conscience | Man |